April 2012

March 2012

Post

New office means new computers for everyone. Barry helps out tremendously behind the scenes with part entry and lots of other site internals that help keep things running smoothly. He's also an avid gamer - and despite Ryan's digs, he does play more than just minecraft. We do take gaming seriously in the office - and unlike many places it's not a fireable offense. So we wanted to make sure his system had enough horsepower so he could play games in between getting work done... but without breaking the budget.

The short answer is YES, Air Cooling as a general consensus is better. The Reasons are because of budget constraints and performance per dollar ratio is better, so I personally would go air cooling if my budget for a cooler was under $100 dollars, which it would be if my budget was $800 dollars.

I'd go with an AIO Liquid Cooler from $100 dollars and up. Most go with the NZXT KrakenX61 it's $120 dollars from B&H because as a general consensus it's know to be the best for the price. It also has a hefty 6 year warranty, while most AIO's only have either 2 or 3 year warranty so you can safely assume that the X61 was build to last.

Although the Swiftech H240-X is considered the Best AIO Liquid Cooler available under $200 dollars. It's retail cost is about $150 dollars, but in reality it will turn out to be close to $180 dollars if not more. I've yet to find one without shipping and taxes unlike the X61 which can be found on B&H which only charges for the product retail price so you get free expedited shipping on items over $49 dollars, and it's tax free for those outside of NY.

For Air Cooling the H7 is probably the best choice for a budget cooler that's just under $40 dollars.

If you want something better I would go with a Phanteks TC12DX for about $50 dollars Note That's the pricing for the white colored model it's about $60 dollars for the other colors it comes in.

I hope this will help you greatly in deciding because I know it's very frustrating finding the right parts. No worries though you're in good hands with the PCPP community, oh no wait that's what Fake Denzel Washington from All State says. We should really come up with a solid slogan here and have Philip run for president against Kanye in 2020.

Godz, come on... not everything has to be a hardcore optimization problem on part selection. I let Barry pick the parts, and that's what he wanted to use. Corsair is not a feature of the build. Other 750W fully-modular PSUs are running around $100+, so $135 for a well reviewed unit is not some outrageous ripoff.

No lan parties in the works, but we have two more staff builds lined up. Our design lead Phil is building a Xeon workstation for graphic design, dev work, and... the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront. We'll be live streaming his build on Thursday at 2pm Central time, though we'll make sure it also gets archived on Youtube for those who can't catch it. After that we'll probably do a build video for our relationship manager Jenny's workstation, though I don't think that'll be a live stream.

Agreed. Even a G3258 doesn't need a liquid cooler, but it looks awesome. Same argument applies for people who try and get crazy OCs using liquid nitrogen or phase change. Not practical in any way, but people still do it.